The present subject matter relates generally to systems and methods for adding interactive functionality to a website, other digital media objects, and computer processor applications.
Many websites offering items for sale implement a shopping cart. Visitors to the website can add an item to a shopping cart using a link or a button. The link or button is often placed next to an image of the item for sale. Once the visitor is finished selecting items to buy, he can check out and purchase the selected items by supplying payment and shipping information using a form on the website.
The payment information submitted will usually be in the form of credit card details. Information can also be in the form of a confirmation from a third party. For instance, the user can be redirected to a third party in order to supply payment information to that party. The third party will then send a reference confirming the payment on behalf of the user, confirming that payment has been received.
The shopping cart interface may be implemented as a server-side application on the web-server hosting the website with the shopping cart functionality. The server may have access to a database of items for sale, and it can keep track of each user visiting the site and what their shopping cart contains. In some implementations, each page sent back to the user contains a short overview of the contents of their shopping cart.
There are implementations of shopping cart functionality that do not rely on a server-side application that is running on the server hosting the website. These may rely on a second web-server implementing shopping cart functionality on behalf of the first one. For these applications, the pages on the first server may contain links enabling a visitor to add items to his shopping cart, view the contents of his shopping cart and to check out and purchase the items in the shopping cart. All these links may be static links to pages on the second server.
In one such implementation, the owner of a first website containing items for sale will register with a service provider who will provide shopping cart functionality. The owner of the first website may receive an account code and a code for each item for sale registered with the service provider.
Each link added on the first website to enable the shopping cart functionality may be a static link to a page hosted by the service provider. Each link may contain the account number. Each link to add an item to the shopping cart may contain the code for that item.
Each time a visitor clicks any of these static links on the first website he is taken to a page on the service provider's server, but is redirected back to the first website after completing the task. The form to check out and the page to view the contents of the shopping cart may be hosted from the service provider's servers.